Unarmed Meditation and Accompanying styles

So I'm a little over 35 unarmed now with 50 meditation, 18 in archery, and 25 + in psychology and mentalist. I have had a chance to try basically all the stock attacks along with some of the hidden recipe attacks. I'd like to start with Unarmed.

Unarmed is fun and gear makes it better but quite frankly it is nothing without combos. I also feel like I am focusing more on damage than crowd control to win a fight. Crowd control is fairly light outside of a movement speed slow or a stun. Impactful debuffs large rage loss ( jab is fairly small and slow), power drain, power block ( like the mushroom men), knock downs, knock ups, attack speed reduction, blinds, damage reduction, disarm and other numerous effects are not being taken advantage of. Some of these are seen on other weapons when I believe they should be on fists.

I would also again encourage that crowd control and unarmed fighting use tactical positioning. The style has access to two short term stuns that could easily set up things like blindsides , strangulation from the back ( stun you and the enemy for set duration while a crushing DOT ticks), sweeps etc. Moving around and being rewarded for it makes the entire combat system more engaging.

Meditation is a kind of all over the place for two reasons. Good buffs on bad combos and good combos with bad buffs. The buffs are actually very helpful 20% resistance to an element or a power/hp boost is great. The one oversight is the crit damage buff that gives 10% archery crit chance( 45 meditation). I'm not even sure if unarmed can crit so I don't know why it's there. Some of the combos are nice too. Flaming fist the level 21 meditation combo is probably the highest potential dps combo available right now and the healing combos are pretty solid when they are not part of a bad combo chain. Which leads me to the bad.

The buffs are all over the place where a lot of combos are just taking up space and useful buffs while the good combos don't have desirable buffs in comparison. Instead of splitting the buffs in a random collection of 50 I suggest giving each tier of 5 a set of buffs. Since meditation basically goes every 4-5 recipes before you hit a new set of meditation items I think it would flow a lot better too. Tiers could look like this:

Every new 5 tiers you get a higher bonus on each depending on what you choose. You still have to make a tough choice for your build but you don't have to get stuck with a bad combo or have to use a less powerful one.

Combos in general are to numerous with only a handful of useful ones to pick from. The first big deal breaker is having a knock back as the opener or in between a combo. In my opinion combos should only have knock backs as finishers. Knocking the monster around for a combo can cause you to pull a lot of aggro, suffer a dps loss and the transition is all together more clunky. A good example is Kick + kick + kick, or Punch, hip toss, punch , cobra strike. It's to much running around, it's to dangerous in dungeons and it's clunky.

A great combo chain is something like Flame fist, and the punch master dailies. Flame fist : Cobra strike, punch, punch. Punch Master punch + punch + punch. Together Cobra strike + punch + punch + punch. Sets the enemy on first and delivers 2x damage on the last punch. Very fluid and rewarding good for dps. Combos need to mirror that kind of fluidity.

Some knock backs can be avoided by using stand in attacks from recipes like body slam to avoid hip tosses knock back but I feel it is a poor system if your combos have to rely on outside recipes to make them work. The secret techniques should add to the combos not make them useable.

Archery with unarmed is nice for front loaded burst damage. They make a great pair for opening on an enemy. Archery synergies with unarmed knock back really well but not with combos. Archery may become a problem later down the line because it allows all hands free skills to be used along with bow skills. Enemy up time is very hard to maintain when they can only get one hit in while they are slowed and bombarded by arrows and then knock backed again. May make fights to easy down the line.

Psychology is great. Very good sustain and the added crowd control is nice. It's a fun style with a lot going for it. With better psyche gear I'm sure it can pull off some neat things.

Mentalism is a bit spammy especially combined with all the comboing I do in unarmed. I am also unsure of how it compares to psychologies healing and resource management. If you look at it at level 1 psych can restore up to 180 resources ( health, power, armor 60 in each) in 1 minute while Mentalism can restore 180 of one resources ( health or armor), 120 of 1 ( heath or armor) and 32 of power or 60 of health, 60 of armor, and 32 of power. This certainly puts psyche above the power curve, slightly above the health/ armor because of 20 second cooldowns, and psyche gets another heal. The damage of mentalism has been not be worth much notice either. The only real edge seems to be the damage buff which psyche can get through mods.

Stratics is the oldest continually running MMORPG Fansite on the Internet. Founded in 1997 Stratics has served the Ultima Online Community for 18 years. We strive to provide the most complete social experience for Ultima Online players.